Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!
In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and add a photo of that location. As you will see, the map transforms into a contextual representation of the students’ backgrounds, inviting them to share meaningful experiences.
If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.
Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!
What No One Tells You About Canvas Notifications
Canvas notifications is an automatic way to stay abreast of activity in your courses as well as contributing to regular effective contact with your students. But there are a few in’s and out’s to using the notifications tool well that you and your students might be missing. Let me elucidate you!
UPDATE: Since I first created this episode, Canvas has added the ability to set course-specific notifications. Good on ya, Canvas!
Two helpful Canvas Guides to share with your students:
Register Now for CCC Digital Learning Day: Free, Online Conference
In October, more than 1,100 educators across California's community colleges and beyond joined us for Can•Innovate. We are happy to announce that our next free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day is now open for registration!
#CCCDLDay, brought to you by CVC-OEI/@ONE, is the California Community College's contribution to the national Digital Learning Day effort. Our theme for 2019 is Exploring Digital Literacies Across the Curriculum. The program has been crafted to engage you and your peers in a day of experimentation and creation, as we rethink and refocus our traditional notions of literacy and imagine how we might teach new digital literacies in all disciplines. You'll see teaching innovations that use Adobe Spark Video, Twitter, and Google Maps and Tour Builder to assess student learning, make relevant connections with content, and engage students in meaningful dialogue. Our day also includes a session led by librarians about information literacy and 3 sessions that include student speakers (hooray!).
Register for one or two sessions or join us for the entire day -- from anywhere. All sessions are delivered online in Zoom so you don't have to worry about traveling!
Program Overview
Our event kicks off on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 9am PT with a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the popular podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University.
The remainder of our morning program includes two sessions that will take you on a deep dive of Adobe Spark Video, a free, easy-to-use video creation tool. At 10:00 Matt Mooney, faculty at Santa Barbara Community College, will join us with one of his students, Amber Greene, to share how he is using Spark Video to transform his tests from drab to dazzle! After Matt and Amber's session, you'll have the opportunity to see a demo of Adobe Spark Video by Donna Caldwell, from Adobe Education. Donna will entice you to participate in our CCCDLDay Create Challenge too. Join in for a chance to win a cool prize from Adobe! We've intentionally left the lunch hour open to encourage you to dabble with Adobe Spark Video and get started on your video creation.
Our afternoon program kicks off with a student panel at 1pm, hosted by Fabiola Torres from Glendale College. Student panels are always the highlight of any event so we're considering this a must attend session for everyone! At 2pm, we're joined by Cynthia Mari Orozco, from East Los Angeles College, and Aloha Sargent, of Cabrillo College, two librarians who will present, Scaffolding Information Literacy in Canvas.
Our final two presentations feature more teaching and learning innovations and one more student too! At 3pm, Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep of Folsom Lake College will showcase how they are each using Twitter for Networked Global Learning. Their examples will redefine formative assessment as you know it and illuminate a whole new way to think about hashtags and brief messages. Finally, at 4pm, Liz du Plessis, from Barstow College and the California Online College, and her student, Mayra Avila, will be our guides for Mapping Content and Contexts with My Maps and Tour Builder by Google. That's right! Google Maps can do a lot more than help you get to your next destination. It can also foster real-world connections in your courses.
If your college is not yet hosting an on-campus viewing room for CCC Digital Learning Day, sign up now! Viewing sessions and creating content with your peers is an awesome way to learn and grow. But if you aren't on campus, no worries. #CCCDLDay is designed to support you no matter where you are.
Using NameCoach for Equitable Student Support Services
According to Beckie Supiano in “How Colleges Can Cultivate Students’ Sense of Belonging”, a growing body of research has linked students’ sense of belonging on their campuses to a number of important outcomes, including their persistence in college and even their well-being. As a result, some colleges make an effort to help students- especially members of underrepresented groups- cultivate that sense. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Aligned with Chancellor Oakley’s Vision for Success to fully close CCC equity gaps, the CVC-OEI provides colleges with innovative tools, technology, and professional development in the areas of instruction and student services. These ongoing efforts include applying an equity lens to address the disparate impact and surface institutional and systemic barriers in order to increase student success.
Darnell G. Cole, an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Education, Identity, and Social Justice at the USC, agrees that colleges should not take students’ sense of belonging for granted. Cole encourages colleges to have “a structure in place that’s designed to communicate that students matter. Just because students got into a college doesn’t mean they feel at home there.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Creating a sense of belonging and inclusion resulted in improved academic performance when the University of Texas improved outreach efforts by sending welcome and belonging messages to students from marginalized communities. In “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging, john a. powell, offers belongingness as a way to move beyond tolerance and respect to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in society. Prudence L. Carter, reflecting on Brown v. Board of Education, in Equity and Empathy: Toward Racial and Educational Achievement in the Obama Era, suggests our policies and practices must be student centered and reflect an institution’s intention, commitment to, and consistent efforts toward actively incorporating students from marginalized communities into every facet of the educational process...in classrooms, counseling sessions, categorical programs, and in the delivery of student services.
NameCoach
The CVC-OEI is supporting efforts in the California Community Colleges (CCC) to increase students’ sense of belonging in online instruction by providing innovative tools such as NameCoach, a new tool that nurtures inclusion in the classroom, available to all OEI consortiums colleges at no cost and available to all non-consortium CCCs at a discounted price. Founder and CEO of NameCoach, Praveen Shanbhag, developed the software to enable true inclusion in school communities through technology. NameCoach is a tool for students to record a pronunciation of their name and convey their gender, and easily share this with instructors, administration, staff, and student peers. The CVC-OEI will incorporate this software to foster belonging in other campus settings, such as the delivery of online student support services.
Why NameCoach? Educators often struggle with correctly pronouncing the names of students from diverse populations. This software addresses the problem of name mispronunciation and misgendering. According to Dereca Blackmon, Associate Dean and Director of the Diversity and First Generation Student Office, Stanford University, NameCoach makes it easy for students’ identities and cultures to be respected. “Belonging Uncertainty” is heightened for students of color and this sense of belonging is not equally distributed for students from traditionally marginalized communities. Mispronouncing students’ names and using the wrong pronouns can increase ‘belonging uncertainty,’ which Stanford research shows can affect students’ performance, stress levels and overall sense of being a valued part of community.” It is also a constant reminder to students that they do not belong. This also applies to misgendering.
Student feedback stresses the positive impact of using NameCoach. “This is great! This is why we push and remain critical. Instituting seemingly small things like this can have the largest impact on campus culture. It is a recognition of the value of diversity on campus.”
NameCoach can be incorporated in online counseling, online mental health services, financial aid online support and online tutoring. Online Counselors will finally have an opportunity to properly pronounce their students names during counseling sessions, leading to increased student engagement and trust. Traditionally used in instruction, NameCoach will expand into online student support services. Using NameCoach is an important step on the road to making student services more inclusive, welcoming and belonging.
Would you like to learn more about using NameCoach to create a sense of belonging within Student Services? Join us on February 1, 2019 at 12pm for a free webinar!
When I signed up for the @ONE suite of courses for the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles, I didn’t expect they would help me to improve my on-campus classes. The Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses are about teaching online, right? Right. Yet I discovered these courses would help me become a better face-to-face teacher, too.
Sometimes,
modality doesn’t matter.
Take, for example, creating a
more equitable classroom. I thought I had this nailed. I teach from the heart.
I get to know my students’ names, interests, and majors. My motto is “Reach
students where they are,” and this motto informs my teaching.
Looking back, I realize now that
I wasn’t providing opportunities for my students to be wholly present in spite
of my best efforts to engage them. I had not designed assignments that would
allow students to draw upon their cultural strengths or heritage, and I kept my
own heritage and personal experience out of the classroom. My syllabus was
professional and complete but devoid of personality and probably a little
off-putting.
As the instructor, I was also
the concierge. I would provide every text up until the research essay. I had
hundreds. I would provide the answers. I had hundreds of those, too.
After the first week of class
and the icebreakers were in the past, it was full speed ahead. There was little
time to pause and ask students to reflect. There was little group work.
There
was room to improve my on-campus classes, too.
It’s clear to see that these
practices had the potential to be counterproductive if they weren’t already
undermining my good intentions to create a welcoming learning community—whether
that community sat ten feet in front of me or across the internet.
But that’s with the benefit of hindsight—hindsight gained after completing the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses: Equity & Culturally Responsive Teaching, Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning, Dynamic Online Teaching, and Digital Citizenship. These courses helped me to improve my online courses and, bonus, my on-campus classes, too.
The
principles espoused in the @ONE courses cross the lines of modality.
As I reflect on what I’ve
learned, here are some key improvements I made:
My syllabus is more student-centered and, I think, more welcoming. It’s also readily available online using mobile or desktop browsers. I continue to improve it.
I designed more activities that draw upon what my students already know and make reflection a key step of the learning process.
I gave up my role as the concierge. Well, almost. I still rely on a key OER text or two, but now, my students are increasingly responsible for locating and creating texts as they strengthen their digital and information literacy.
I ask more questions. My students start collaborating in groups from the beginning of the course until the end, and I’ve seen this work pay off in more ways than one.
I’m still learning and improving both my online and on-campus classes, and the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses continue to inform my practice. In hindsight, I shouldn’t be surprised that regardless of modality, the principles of effective teaching and learning are the same. Welcome students and empower them as learner-explorers. Give them guidance and plenty of opportunities for fearless practice. Connect them with each other. These principles help create a stronger learning community—online or on-campus. Completing the Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles courses reinforced these principles and helped me to see new ways I can put them into effect regardless of teaching modality.
In November, a group of five college students representing the California Community Colleges and California State University systems participated in a virtual panel at the annual Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) conference. Projected on a screen in front of hundreds of educators, students shared their candid reflections and experiences with technology in teaching and learning.
I had the honor of moderating the panel with support from J.P. Bayard, Director for System-Wide Learning Technologies and Program Services at the CSU Chancellor's Office. As always, listening to student experiences inspired me and reconnected me with the reasons I do what I do. As technology plays a more expansive role in teaching and learning, we must make efforts to center what we do around the real experiences of the humans at the other end of the screen. I also find myself reflecting on the courage it took these students to volunteer to participate and be candid about their experiences. And that is also something all of us can learn from.
I hope you listen to the 30-minute recording and let the students' messages inform your practices as you start the new term ahead. Leave us a comment below and share a takeaway -- we'd love to hear from you!
https://youtu.be/tjEf6SDtvqk
30-Minute Archive of a student panel from the 2018 DET/CHE Conference.
Quick Links
Don't have 30 minutes to listen? Here are the 5 questions the students were asked and a video quick link to their responses.
3:28 Reflect on your experiences as a college student and answer this question, "I wish my teachers would _____________. "
8:08 If your instructor gave you the choice for a test to: write a paper, create a video, or create a verbal presentation, how would you feel about having that choice? Which option would you choose and why?
18:03 How are you using mobile devices to access the resources and services provided by your instructors and college?
20:25 Why did you choose to take an online class? What makes an online class a good learning experience?"
Link, Link. Who's Got the (properly formatted) Link?
Links are how your students navigate your course content. While it might seem like a picayune matter, knowing how to set links up properly will have a pretty big impact on how quickly and easily students can start interacting with all the great content in your course (and it’ll increase your Canvas Ninja factor considerably!).
NOTE: This episode was updated in January '22 to reflect the new rich content editor.
